Generally described, beneficial dietary choices may reduce chronic disease while improving longevity and quality of life. However, because the overall diet is determined by a series of individual selections, identification and habitual selection of high quality food items is a prerequisite for a healthy diet.
Conventional methods for selecting a healthy diet include the categorization of food items into a limited number of food “groups” and the listing of basic nutritional information, such as the “Nutrition Facts” panel required by the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act (NLEA) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Unfortunately, the categorization of foods is imprecise, since food items in the same food “group” may have widely divergent health properties. Furthermore, conventional nutritional information may be incomplete, misleading, difficult to understand, lacking uniformity due to dependence on serving size, and obscured and/or manipulated by neutral components such as water.
What is desired, therefore, is a method and system for more thoroughly and accurately evaluating and rating the nutritional quality of individual food items.